Experts at AAAS Pacific Division Meeting Explore Strategies for Making Sustainability Popular

SAN FRANCISCO—Students usually arrive at San Diego's High Tech High with a commitment to education, but in Jay Vavra's 11th grade biology class, they get an immersion in sustainability that may be life-changing.

In many schools, their lessons would come from a textbook, supplemented by online materials. But for Vavra's class at the acclaimed charter school, they shape their own projects and then go out into the field to study ecosystems and the humans who inhabit them. When the projects are done, they come back and collaborate on books about their research.

“There's something about students knowing their community,” Vavra says. “It's a way for them to know themselves…. And maybe it can encourage them to take better care of their communities.”

Vavra offered insights about his students and their success in a presentation at the annual meeting of the AAAS Pacific Division. For a panel that convened to explore sustainability as a way of life, it was an inspiring suggestion that people—and young people in particular—are most likely to embrace the concept once they experience the connection to it and importance of it in their own lives.

To learn more about the sustainability symposium, read the full story.